nixsight

Very quickly, while I’m in front of the computer and it’s in my head – we saw Michael Mann’s latest, “Public Enemies” on Wednesday…

It was alright.

I’d like to be more enthusiastic about it – Mann is one of the best directors around, and while a lacklustre cinema experience might be understandable from most, from him it’s a terrible dissappointment.

The film boasts some great actors delivering good performances from a script with some nice flourishes but not much cohesion, and there’s something off about the structure of the film that means there are lots of odd little off-cut bits of plot or scenes hanging off in various places.

In fact, the film generally feels a little unfinished. The sound is often patchy – so often that you actually really notice when it comes together for the impressive gun-battle set-pieces. Editing and frame composition, too, are inconsistent, and these are factors over which Mann normally has complete and thrilling control. There are only a few bright and inspirational moments of cinematography, and too often they are wrecked by shaky camera work which doesn’t suit the scene.

Oddly, Mann has created a film that is more frenetic and disorienting in the moments that the viewer is supposed to be calm during than it is in the frantic moments of battle or passion.

It’s peculiar, in that there are many times during the film that it is obvious that this is a Michael Mann film – many signature touchstones are there, such as the loving detail paid to filming the varied firearms that the characters use, and the beautiful attention to detail during the sporadic heist sequences. But it feels like another step away from the perfectly formed, concise and gorgeous “Collateral” – it is as if that film was a focal point for the man’s particular vision, at which all of the elements were fine-tuned and worked together efficiently and perfectly, and since then his talent has started to wander afield more.

“Miami Vice” began the drift – the film had incredible aesthetic polish but lacked narrative clarity. And now “Public Enemies” continues the trend, with less polish, and even less coherent storytelling.

It’s possible that the emotional flatness of the film isn’t entirely down to the film-maker. I’ve talked before, when reviewing “Valkyrie”, about the difficulty in cinema of  fostering a connection between an audience and an ambiguously moral (or totally amoral) historical story, in which the outcome is known or obvious – when we already know with certainty who is going to live and who is going to die, many of the most common tricks available to a director lose a lot of their power. In “Valkyrie”, when characters emotionally try to tell the protagonist that his plan is doomed to failure, there is never any emotional weight to it for the viewer, because there is never any possibility that he will succeed. We aren’t as masochistic as we might think, and we’re unlikely to get all invested in someone that we know won’t win, at least at a subconscious level.

In “Public Enemies”, the same is true – the only emotional hook to the film is essentially that someone tells Dillinger that eventually he’ll get caught or die, then another person tells him if he carries on, he’ll die, then a woman he is wooing tells him she doesn’t want to get involved with someone who is definitely going to die but does anyway, and then he dies.

I feel the film might have more documentary value than it does as a movie experience – certainly, it feels like all historical angles are shown, if not covered in much depth, and a lot of work has been done to capture the era – but similar to Bryan Singer’s approach with “Valkyrie”, Mann’s flat and uncompromising approach to the viewer, and his unwillingness to spoon-feed them information – commendable in a more efficient film like “Collateral”, or a more sculpted narrative like “Heat” or “Miami Vice” – means that the audience doesn’t really get a satisfying historical insight into the events either.

Oddly, 2007′s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” doesn’t suffer from the same pitfalls for me, and I think that’s down to it’s idiosyncratic storytelling technique – the voice-over, as “voice of the film”, is laying everything out for you and giving it context as it happens, but the characters and events within the film have no consciousness of what is going to happen at any point, and as such it becomes easier for us as observers to relate to what is going on – the filmmakers have made perfect choices about what to decode for us, and what to let us feel for ourselves, and as such we feel the emotional weight of the inevitability of events shown, rather than feeling like we’re just waiting to get it over with.